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The Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) engage regularly with colleges, which, are key anchors for the transition to Net Zero, acting as both community enablers and demonstration hubs in cities and regions.

SFC’s College Infrastructure Strategy , published in November 2022, describes the Scottish Funding Council’s approach to determining future investment in Scotland’s college estate and other college infrastructure. The strategy sets out the collective approach between SFC and colleges to develop an Infrastructure Investment Plan (IIP) for Scotland’s colleges. The plan, which will cover the period from 2024-34, will identify infrastructure investment need including investment for net zero.

The Scottish Government and sportscotland passionately believe that sport is for everyone. We should all feel included, and able to take part and access the benefits of sport.

An ongoing priority for the Scottish Government is to support participation across all groups and tackle inequalities in participation.

Currently available Scottish Health Survey data shows that 11-15 year old’s participation in sport appears to have remained stable since pre-covid levels at 65%. Other data that we use to track participation in sport is published by sportscotland.

Recent data published by sportscotland in 2023 shows significantly increased participation levels in their national Active Schools programme, across the past academic year (2022-23), with over 4.6 million visits (a rise of 34% on 2021-22) made to almost 247,000 Active Schools sessions. The number of Active Schools participants (over 269,000 children and young people), deliverers (over 17,900 with 90% of those being volunteers), and school/club links (over 2,500) also increased from the previous academic year as the recovery from covid continued.

Table 1 provides information on average gross revenue expenditure in Scotland per child attending pre-school, and primary and secondary pupil alongside allocations (accounting for teaching and tuition fees funding) per college and university place.

The co-production process through which stakeholders are designing the Centre for Teaching Excellence will conclude in the first half of 2024, followed by a process to identify a suitable host institution(s). We expect the Centre for Teaching Excellence to launch shortly thereafter.

The Teaching bursary advisory group is reconvened at the end of each year’s scheme. The role of the group is to review the implementation of the bursary scheme and provide advice on any necessary changes for the following year’s scheme.

The 2023-24 Teaching bursary advisory group is due to meet in March. Members include the Scottish Government, Skills Development Scotland, COSLA, Universities and the Scottish Council of Deans.

Funding was allocated to Local Authorities on behalf of 304 secondary schools for computing science hardware on a demand-led basis. Local Authorities distributed funding on behalf of the Scottish Government, with the total claimed at approximately £730,000.

Grant funding to support Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science (STACS) / University of Glasgow commenced in 2021 and has continued on an annual basis since that date.

As a condition of the funding support the Scottish Government agreed with Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science a commitment to publish annual progress reports which are published on their website where updates and activity are regularly posted. The first year’s report is publicly available on the STACS website and they will be publishing a year 2 update report in the summer of 2024.

The annual report for 2022-23 is available at: https://issuu.com/stacshq/docs/stacsannualreport .

Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science is responsible for developing and implementing the National Upskilling Plan for computing science teachers. The National Upskilling pilot developed over 6 hours of high-quality upskilling material with 71 teachers registering from 27 councils and 50 education authority schools and 11 independent schools. On average, 30 teachers participated in the live workshops with evaluation feedback showing many participants reporting increased confidence and understanding. Utilising feedback from the pilot, the second iteration of the Upskilling Programme was expanded to include upskilling at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher level and is currently being completed and will be evaluated as part of this next phase of work. STACS will continue to evaluate future phases of the Upskilling Programme.

The National Upskilling Plan for Computing Science teachers is a multi-year upskilling programme to support teachers keep pace with this fast-changing subject area. As this is a core tenet of STACS aims and deliverables, the Scottish Government will continue to support this for the duration of the grant funding arrangement with STACS until 2026-7.

Although the number of individual Computing Science teachers visiting the website is not tracked, the STACS website is an important resource for the Computing Science community. 490 Computing Science teachers are members of the STACS website and have access to the full set of resources. Since launching in 2022 the website has had 53,000 unique visits.